


Ethological Models for Pack-Oriented Stress Management

by Guede



Series: Sustainable Management [16]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alive Laura Hale, Alphahood Doesn't Come With A Manual, Alternate Universe - No Hale Fire, Alternate Universe - Werewolves Are Known, Human Alpha Stiles Stilinski, Incest, Intercrural Sex, M/M, Magical Stiles Stilinski, Multi, Pack Dynamics, Polyamory, Sheriff Stilinski is a Good Parent
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-28
Updated: 2016-09-28
Packaged: 2018-08-18 06:29:01
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,603
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8152334
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Guede/pseuds/Guede
Summary: When Stiles’ father is temporarily put on sick leave, Stiles decides it’s time to step up and be an alpha.  Unfortunately, he doesn’t have the best first day.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Marcella was introduced in [Collaborative Bonding Rituals](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5900362). You can read this story without reading that one, but it provides context.

Stiles hates deer. He knows that’s not very politically correct of him, what with working for the Service and all, but when you really think about it, why would you expect somebody who’s quasi-botanical to like deer? Deer eat foliage and strip bark and trample saplings, and if they had their way, the forests of the world would be eaten down to the dirt-line. There wouldn’t even be toothpicks left. Also, they are stupid, dumb animals who don’t know to get out of the road and who have enough mass to wreck not only themselves, but also the car.

Okay. He might be a little bit biased, but seeing as that’s his dad’s car, _with_ his dad in it, up there in that fir tree, and that is a stupid, dead deer with bumper marks on it over there, he feels like he’s got reasonable cause. “Dad? Dad? Hey, listen, we’ve got you, it’s just I gotta figure out this…this little thing but it’s okay! It’s okay, really, it’s just me and the tree don’t want to rattle you around, um, more than you already have—”

“It’s fine, Stiles, take your time,” his dad calls. He _sounds_ strong, and he’s said over and over again that he isn’t bleeding and hasn’t lost feeling in any extremities and doesn’t have anything sticking out of him that shouldn’t be. “Just try not to break the car up, would you? Jesus, we were doing so well with the vehicle quota this year…”

He also sounds resigned enough that Stiles believes him, even if the Nemeton wasn’t backing him up by telling Stiles his dad still has good vitals. But, well, Stiles was hanging out on the Hales’ back porch with Derek and then he suddenly gets snapping wood and splinters flying and contorted metal and _hurry hurry_ from the tree in his head. Honestly, he feels like he’s doing pretty good just standing here and remembering he should think about structural integrity when figuring out how to get his dad’s car down, and not just telling the Nemeton to have the fir to dump it.

“I think it’s this knot over here,” Derek says, still a little breathless from piggybacking Stiles over. He leans against the tree and starts to point, then pulls his hand back to cough in it. Shakes his head, grimaces at himself and raises his hand again. “The undercarriage…is hooked onto it. If you can get the tree to tilt the car this way, and I go there, I can grab the—”

“Hey, hey! Sorry, just—oh, God, is he okay?” Scott spills over the top of the hill, eyes widening as he spots the tree. “Call—call Mom—”

When Stiles shakes his hand and points to his phone, signaling he already did that, Scott stumbles to a stop. He sniffs, looks at Stiles again, and then lets his shoulders fall in a gusty sigh of relief. And then he nearly falls over, he’s so short of breath, and Cora and Isaac both grab an arm to keep him up.

“Isaac and I were out getting some wild turkeys for Mom, and Scott was just around,” Cora explains, seeing Stiles look at her. “So what happened? Did he try and drive up the trunk?”

“ _No_ , why would he even—it’s just when the deer made him swerve off the road, the tree figured it was better to divert the momentum rather than have it all go towards smashing the car in half against this fir here, and then stuff got tangled and—” Stiles starts.

“Look, the incident report comes after, can we just get me down first?” Stiles’ dad calls. He still doesn’t sound like he’s concerned or panicking, but his tone is starting to shade into irritation.

Derek snaps his fingers to get Cora’s attention. She gives him an incredulous look, he raises his brows to tell her now is _not_ the time for taking offense, and then he points to a spot next to him. Rolling her eyes and stripping off her coat as she goes, she walks over and she and Derek both raise their arms till their fingertips are just touching the bottoms of the car’s back tires.

“I think we better go here,” Scott mutters, warily eyeing a piece of metal hanging out of the undercarriage. He pulls Isaac over by the elbow, positioning them about the midpoint of the car, then squints upward. “Oh, I think I—Stiles, there’s this branch—”

“Hooked into it, I was just telling him,” Derek says.

“I _know_ , okay, I got it, I’m the one with the tree vision, okay?” Stiles snaps. “Just—just—okay?”

“Okay,” Scott says, drawing out the word a little bit, the way he talks with rescued wild animals.

Derek doesn’t say anything, but he stops throwing annoyed glares around and just looks up at the car. Stiles…takes a breath, and tugs the Nemeton back into his headspace—it’d eased off to just a comforting murmur—so he has a good mental visual of where all the branches are. “Dad? Listen, count of three, we’re gonna…we kind of have to slide it out, so we’re gonna—we’re gonna—”

“Sounds good, Stiles,” his dad says. “It’ll be fine, all right? Never mind about the damn car, I’ll take care of it. Wasn’t your fault anyway.”

“For once, right?” Stiles says, laughing a little. So he has to take another breath, after wasting his first one, and then he concentrates and the fir shivers all over before its branches start to bend out of the way.

The car doesn’t move at first, and then it suddenly jerks downward, with a really, really loud cracking noise. Isaac and Cora jump and Cora is so startled she actually leaps up to grab the car, so a cursing Derek has to grab the back of her shirt to steady her, but Stiles manages to keep himself focused on what he’s doing and he just keeps the branches moving slowly out of the way. And the car sinks down, begins to tilt—Cora’s feet are flat on the ground again—and then levels out. It shifts a second time and the body deforms to the tune of groaning metal, but not too much. At least, Stiles’ father isn’t screaming or anything.

Finally the branches are out of the way enough for Scott and Isaac to get handholds on the underside of the car. They walk the car the rest of the way out, and with Derek and Cora’s help, get it onto the ground. Derek pokes twice around the front door, then grabs it by the handle and a piece of the edge that’s bent out of the frame and just rips it off.

“It’s basically scrap anyway,” Derek says as Stiles’ dad eases himself out of the car.

“Still, don’t think you need to do the junkyard’s job for them,” Stiles’ father mutters. He’s got half-dried blood on his lip, and a couple of bruises are showing on his face through the powder from the airbag, mostly around his eye, but he does look okay. First thing he does after snarking at Derek is to drop his arm around Stiles’ shoulders and squeeze. “Hey, son. Sorry about the fuss.”

“Oh, my God, Dad, I blame the deer,” Stiles says, squeezing back. Maybe a little too hard; his dad grunts and the man might be walking but they should still check him for internal injuries. “Whatever, come on, Laura said she’d follow up with the paramedics, let’s get you over to the camp-site to meet them—”

Stiles’ dad grimaces. “Paramedics?”

“Um, you should get checked out, even if you feel fine,” Scott chimes in. “A lot of things won’t show up right away. Also, Mom’s heard about this now and she’ll track you down.”

For a second Stiles’ father thinks about blowing it off anyway (Stiles _inherited_ that face, he can read it in the dark). Then he sighs. “Right. Well, fine, let’s get this over with.”

* * *

Thankfully, the scans all come back and there’s nothing wrong with Stiles’ father that can’t be handled at home with ice and non-ibuprofen painkillers and quality rest time. “Which means _rest_ , Dad, and just so you know, I took your CB radio too,” Stiles says, clutching his box containing his father’s laptop, assorted cell-phones, beepers, and basically anything else with communications capability. “Concussions don’t just go away and the last thing you need to do is stress out your brain. Which is why I boned up on studies of what electronic screens and devices do to your brain activity. Also your eyes. Eye strain. Doesn’t help.”

“The CB radio doesn’t have any screens attached to it,” his father mutters from where he’s sitting on his bed.

“It still requires you to process information and that’s not good for you right now,” Stiles says. “And don’t even try to sneak paper files past me either. I will sic Melissa on you when she gets off her shift and she will not have it, Dad. She just won’t.”

His dad glares at him, and while things start out level, Stiles hasn’t even managed to point out his dad is tilting before his dad grimaces and puts his hand up to the side of his head. The man tries really, really hard for another couple seconds, then just caves and waves his hand at Stiles. “Fine. I will…sit here and…do nothing. Happy?”

“You know, you’re past the observation period, you could take a nap,” Stiles says. He steps out through the doorway, then shifts the box to rest against his hip. “Come on, Dad, you’re always complaining about being on-call twenty-four-seven. When’s the last time you didn’t have to worry about getting hauled into the office?”

“Son, are you _trying_ to make me think about how I have no idea what’s going on down there?” his dad says, putting head in hands but tipping that so that he’s back to glowering at Stiles. Then he sighs again, one hand sliding up to pull at his hair. “Yeah, yeah, I remember, Tara’s rescheduling everything for me. And I’m sure you and the tree can stall anything that comes up, just so long as you remember—”

“—that I need to tell Melissa if it’s an emergency and she makes the call about whether we need to get in extra help,” Stiles dutifully rattles off.

His father nods absently. The man’s not even looking at Stiles anymore, but instead is staring at the floor as if the carpet texture deeply offends his soul. He’s still pulling at his hair, and Stiles almost asks whether his dad actually took the painkillers the doctors prescribed him. But then his dad’s shoulders slump and Stiles realizes that it’s all just his dad being frustrated.

Sure, Stiles gets it. When he’s put out of commission (usually because he accidentally got exposed to meat during the non-carnivorous period of the tree’s cycle and puked up acorns on somebody), he gets antsy too. And _no_ , he isn’t feeling any revenge-driven schadenfreude about getting to be the one who stands there and tells his dad that there will be _no_ sneaking around the recovery time, kid, all exits are guarded and all breakouts will be thwarted.

Well, okay. Maybe he’s feeling a tiny bit of that. But mostly, he’s watching his dad struggle with just feeling comfortable enough to relax and let go for an actual medical reason, and he’s feeling really guilty. He generally thinks that their office does pretty well, considering all the factors, but he’s reconsidering now and God, they do have a lot of fire drills, literal and metaphorical.

“So, Scott and I are going to be downstairs for the rest of the afternoon,” Stiles says. “Peter’s going to take over after dinner so Derek and I can make a trip out to the tree. If you need something, you can just mutter and somebody will hear it.”

“I’m guessing that I’ll get somebody asking if my heartbeat even flips,” his dad says under his breath, though from his expression he’s not trying to test out the werewolf early-alarm system. He presses his lips together, then looks up at Stiles. “Well, look, I’ll try out this…rest…thing. And you just don’t—just try and take it easy too, all right? Don’t run around trying to fix what you don’t have to.”

“Oh, yeah, Dad, of course,” Stiles says. “No need to worry about me, I’ll take care of everything.”

His dad opens his mouth and lifts one hand, pauses, and then uses that hand to press against the side of his face. Then he puts it down on the bed and carefully leans against it as he swings his legs up onto the mattress. “All right, Stiles. Guess you’d better take those away before I regret this.”

“Dad, it’s not me,” Stiles says. “It’s the doctors.”

From the way his father spits out that grunt, Stiles figures it’s time to beat a tactical retreat. He heads on down the stairs and into the kitchen, where Scott is still rooting around in the fridge.

Actually, Scott is not rooting around in the fridge. Scott is putting things into the fridge. Things in plastic clamshells that look an awful lot like pieces of pie and cake and other sugary, fatty stuff. “Stiles, Mom said,” Scott says, seeing Stiles’ face. “She gave me specific orders, and she told me if you threw out anything, I had to let her know which ones because she was going to replace them with whole pies and cakes.”

“That is completely not in line with current medical consensus,” Stiles says, but he resists the urge to slap those containers out of his buddy’s hands. He does need a distraction so he looks around, remembers what he’s holding, and puts the box on the counter. Then he starts clearing out one of the cabinets so that he has room for his dad’s phones and laptop in there. “Ugh, fine, but for the record, you can tell her that I totally do not buy that she’s just stocking up for when she and Chris come over, and any love handles my dad gets during his recovery time are on her.”

Scott looks sympathetic, but he’s not slowing down in emptying out that bag at his feet (which is ridiculously big, even by the standards of somebody who regularly receives packages from Talia Hale’s kitchen). “How’s he doing?”

“Grumpy,” Stiles snorts. He sticks in the last phone and shuts the cabinet, and then pulls out a piece of chalk to add extra security wards to the door. “Worried about whether the office is going to collapse into a federally-designated disaster zone in his absence. You know, the usual.”

“Well, it’s supposed to be a quiet week, isn’t it?” Scott says, trying to find the good news for Stiles. “Not really anything going on, I think Tara was telling Mom that they got lucky and there aren’t even a lot of camping permits issued for the weekend.”

“Yeah, true, but you know it’s the quiet weeks when we end up blowing up the most stuff,” Stiles says, scribbling away.

The fridge door shuts kind of sharply, and when Stiles looks over, Scott’s fidgeting a little. “Um, were we…were we going to?” Scott asks nervously.

“I wasn’t planning on it, but I’m just saying, you don’t know, right?” Stiles says. “I mean, it’s summer, school is out, and the statistical breakdown of people who do dumb stuff in the preserve tends to skew younger, and—look, I don’t _want_ to, and I’m gonna try really hard not to. But if you _have_ to blow up something, there’s just not really a substitute, Scott.”

“Why don’t we focus on what we can do to make sure we don’t blow up something?” Scott says after a second. “Since we’re not there yet, and the goal is to not get there. I could probably take a couple extra patrols this week, to start with, and Allison’s free too.”

Stiles lowers his chalk for a second. “I thought you said you two were going shopping for dorm room stuff.”

“Well, but that’s not really that important,” Scott says with a shrug. Because he is the bestest, most there-for-you friend ever. “We can do that next week. Or just do it online. Allison just wanted to go to a couple places so she could find something to keep her crossbow gear in, but you or Lydia probably know a website we can get that from.”

“That is very, very true, and I am so happy that you associate me with your stylish weapon-hiding needs,” Stiles says, grinning. “I am assuming that that’s what you mean.”

“It is kind of against dorm rules to have that stuff in her room, and she doesn’t have anything at home that’d look natural,” Scott says just a little sheepishly, not because he’s embarrassed about complimenting Stiles, but because he just gets that way about rule-breaking. “All her cases are plain metal or plastic.”

“Scotty, if Allison wants to help me hold down the office till my dad’s back up and running, I will personally decoupage her a case in on-trend hipster patterns,” Stiles says. “Okay, cool. So let me just finish up this rune, and then we can sit down and really think this through.”

* * *

Actually, once Stiles gets done securing his dad’s electronics against interference (including any lapse of common sense by said dad), he figures what the hell, he has a pack and this is the kind of situation that packs were made for. So he puts out a group text, and also mentions that his fridge is full of desserts.

He’s just trying to be realistic about the fact that it’s a nice summer day and most of the people he knows are enjoying their last days of freedom before plunging into college overdrive, because hey, packs are supposed to rally around their alpha but pack mentality doesn’t mean brainwashed. But what ends up happening is he attracts a bunch of freeloaders.

“I’m not freeloading, I’ve been patrolling these stupid woods since I could hang onto Mom’s back,” Cora protests. “I’ll help, it’s just if you say you have pie, I expect pie.”

“You literally have your own pie,” Stiles says. “You have an in-house pie _maker_.”

Cora rolls her eyes. “Look, Mom’s pies are awesome, but you can get tired of anything if you eat too much of it, and she gets weird if we bring in outside pie.”

Everyone stares at her, even Jackson—who bitches significantly less when they meet at the Hales’ house, and that’s not _all_ down to sheer terror—except for Stiles. Who stares at Derek.

“Laura and Mom said if Isaac comes, she has to come,” Derek mutters, while attempting to turtle into the collar of his coat, like the big, bad, leatherclad werewolf he is.

Isaac’s head swivels around and he looks at Derek with a sort of bemusedly irritated expression. Since Laura finished her degree and moved back home, Isaac’s been intersecting with Stiles’ life a bit more and Stiles has started to realize the guy isn’t just wallpaper, so much as he has a healthy skepticism of the intra-Hale bickering and chooses to communicate it non-verbally most of the time.

“Laura didn’t say that, she said, so are you and Isaac cool or not, and I said, I don’t even know the guy, let me see and I’ll get back to you,” Cora says, giving her brother a jab in the arm. “Stop blaming Isaac for the fact that you don’t know how to lose a tail, Derek. As if you haven’t had my whole _life_ to learn that.”

Derek makes a face at Cora, who jabs him again. Isaac glances between them, then sidles over two steps so he’s more behind Scott. “I need practice with patrols anyway, and Scott said you wouldn’t mind if I got it in with you guys instead of Laura,” Isaac says to Stiles. “Also, honestly, I’m not really that big on pie.”

“Oh, but Mom had me bring over cheesecake too,” Scott says brightly. “You like that.”

Isaac, at least, has the decency to look mildly ashamed of himself in front of Stiles, not that that stops him from giving Scott a furtive thank-you nod. Stiles suppresses his sigh and just reminds himself that when it comes to patrols, greater numbers are generally considered to be a benefit. “Yeah, sure, though I think we’ll keep you away from the tree for now—I don’t think you’ve gone through the official training for that, right?” Stiles says.

“We have more of a need for people on the periphery anyway,” Lydia tells them from where she’s manipulating patrol pairings on a spreadsheet. “Assuming the rangers will be sticking to their usual routes, which keeps them near the tree…can we assume that?”

“Um, yeah, I think so,” Stiles says, blinking. “I mean, I haven’t heard anything about them changing things around because of Dad, and—well, assume that for now. I’m stopping by the office later to pick up some stuff and I’ll double-check that.”

Scott and Derek both cock their heads at that, because they know Stiles was _not_ planning to make any such visit. Although that’s partly because Stiles had been going to spend the afternoon doing wildlife counts (and probably outdoor sex, let’s be honest here) with Derek, but obviously that’s no longer going to happen now.

“Oh, sorry, I can’t do that slot, I just remembered that Dad’s got to drive up to Sacramento for his licensing class,” Allison is saying as she looks over Lydia’s shoulder. “I try to be home for that since he gets back so late. Can I swap with Jackson?”

“No,” Jackson says, and then sort of scrunches his shoulders. It’s not really an apology, but by his standards it’s a pretty serious attempt to signal he didn’t really mean to come off that sharp. “I’m not being an asshole, I just have to do that night because my dad is dragging us to some party at his firm the next night.”

“You can swap with Cora,” Lydia says, which of course attracts Cora’s attention.

She wanders over to the computer, which leaves Derek to slip over to Stiles. “Do we have enough people?” Derek asks. “Because I can always go tell Laura that she can’t dump her betas on us and not show up herself.”

“No, I think we’ll be fine,” Stiles says. He reaches out and rubs at Derek’s arm where Cora had been poking, and when Derek raises his brows, snickers and gives it an extra pat. “You were holding it funny, I just wanted to check that your healing was still working.”

Derek snorts. “It’s her, not Laura. She just bosses people like she thinks she’s an alpha.”

Stiles snickers again and Cora shoots them a dirty look. Which Derek ignores, choosing instead to slide up against Stiles so that Stiles’ arm ends up around his waist. Stiles leans his head against Derek’s shoulder for a second, absently thinking that it’s nice to have a little support and that’s an odd thought, considering all he’s been doing for the past couple hours is standing around. “Nah, really,” Stiles says after a second. “It’s not an emergency, I just want to make sure my dad gets enough rest. Anyway, Peter’s supposed to be done with his case today so he’ll be free for the rest of the week, right?”

“He’s also pushing Mom to see whether they can move up open hunt night and thin out the deer some more,” Derek says.

“Seriously?” Stiles says, pulling back.

Derek does not appear to be smirking, and it’s not because he’s instead choosing to express his incredulousness via scowling. If anything, he looks surprised that Stiles is surprised, as if Stiles wouldn’t automatically understand that Peter’s reaction to a deer freaking out in front of Stiles’ dad’s car is to exact vengeance on the general deer population of the preserve.

So Stiles can get there, but not immediately. He thinks he knows werewolves pretty well now, and more importantly, knows _Peter_ , but still. “Okay. Okay, I am…I am going to have a discussion with Peter about that, because deer are an important component of the local ecosystem. And I am hoping that your mom is slowboating that one. Actually, let me rephrase that, please tell me that your mom is doing that.”

“I wasn’t really listening, but I think she told Peter that she was going to burn a layer of the schichttorte if she stopped right then and they could come back to it later,” Derek says.

“Well, it’s a good thing enhanced hearing doesn’t matter if you mean to eavesdrop or not, it happens anyway,” Stiles says, heaving out his breath. He leans against Derek again, then pushes off with a quick rub to the back of Derek’s neck. “And kudos to your mom’s ability to murder-block with baking, that is a rare art form. Also, um, excuse me, I’m just…gonna…”

“Oh, if you need to leave for the office now, I think we’re going to be working on the schedule for a while anyway,” Scott says, looking up from where he’s joined everybody else clustered around Lydia’s computer. He pauses as somebody’s stomach growls, then glances towards the kitchen. “Actually, maybe now is a good time to take a snack break too.”

“Sure! Sure, that sounds great, and thanks, Scott,” Stiles says. “I won’t be out that long, just need to zip over and grab the stuff and then I’ll be right back. And you guys should eat all the pie you want. _All_ the pie.”

Well, technically, he’s not throwing it out if they eat it, he figures. And Cora is totally a freeloader, but sometimes you can’t be that picky about your help. That’s just life.

* * *

Derek doesn’t stay for the pie, obviously. Stiles needs to go somewhere, and Derek is very good at getting Stiles from point A to point B. And normally Stiles might protest this and remind Derek that he has a jeep and is also good at getting himself from point A to point B, but Stiles is a little preoccupied at the moment. One, he needs to get hold of Peter, because for all that he is less than fond of deer at the moment, he has a duty to his tree to make sure the preserve has a healthy population of native wildlife.

Two, he needs to figure out something for him to do at the office. It did cross his mind to just admit to Derek that he doesn’t need to go there, and then they could just park somewhere, wait, and drive back. Except they wouldn’t actually just park somewhere. They’d probably end up getting to second base, at least, because that’s what happens when Stiles and Derek sit in a car without anything else to do, and that just feels…like not really helping Stiles’ dad, which is the whole point here.

So when they get in Derek’s car, Stiles tells Derek to drive to the office. Derek eyes him a little bit, but obligingly pulls onto the road. Thankfully it _is_ Derek and not Peter, who would be verbally tangoing around the issue till Stiles just got fed up with trying to keep his vocal toes out of the way and admitted it. But Derek just drives and gives Stiles a chance to think (and text Peter, who is not answering, and Stiles has to reach out to the tree and just check really quickly that there hasn’t been a deer massacre recently).

By the time they get there, Stiles has just about settled on going in and grabbing the first expense report he sees—his dad’s always got at least one he’s been putting off—when he notices that there’s a strange car parked in an official visitor slot. As far as he knows, they aren’t expecting any visitors.

“Who’s that?” Derek says, also noticing the car.

Stiles says he doesn’t know and Derek immediately gets a suspicious look on his face. He parks the car and gets out, and then cuts in front of it so that he hits the office’s front door first. Stops to sniff and cock his head, and in the middle of that a ranger steps out, is briefly surprised to see Stiles, and then invites them in to talk to their visitor, Braeden from the CDC.

“Hi,” Stiles says from around a still-protective Derek’s shoulder. “Do we have another infestation of evil hallucinogenic mold that everybody failed to tell me about?”

Tara, who’d apparently been showing Braeden something on the map, groans quietly into her hand before straightening up. “Stiles, how’s your dad? Keeping him good and rested?”

“Oh, yeah, he’s totally incommunicado, no contact with the outside world except by werewolf, he’s cool,” Stiles says, narrowing his eyes at her. Because he likes Ranger Graeme and thinks she’s probably adapted to Nemeton work the fastest out of all the rangers, but believe him, he never lets professional admiration get in the way of sniffing out a secret. “So I guess I better look at whatever it is, since he’s unavailable.”

“Sorry to hear about his accident,” Braeden says. She’s been standing by the front counter the whole time, closely but casually watching all of them. “Deer, huh.”

So Stiles remembers her from the whole haunted motel fall-out, but he didn’t actually get to meet her then, except for when his dad escorted her by in the hospital with a quick ‘this is Stiles, my son and the tree guardian, now how long is the course of treatment?’ and so this is the first time he’s getting a proper look at her. Initial appearances are pretty good: hiking boots that look well broken-in, unfussy jeans tucked into their tops, hair tied securely back from her face. Her leather jacket’s got cool angular tailoring that is kind of out of place for a day in the woods, but Stiles admits it’s hard to fault her on that one, given the Hale leather coat budget (an actual, real thing, because leather that can stand up to were activity is expensive and Peter, at least, will not let that be wasted on subpar cutting).

“Yep, deer,” Derek says, using that monotone of his that makes perfectly innocent Rottweilers edge off. “Derek Hale. You’re repping the CDC, you might want to check in with my—”

“I just came from your mother’s house,” Braeden says calmly. “Actually, your sister brought me.”

Most people wouldn’t catch that extra flattening of Derek’s glower, but Stiles does and he backs up to pat his beta on the back. After all, it’s not Derek’s fault that Laura has inexplicably failed on the part about keeping pack in the loop (or, to be honest, that Stiles forgot to hack his dad’s phone and check his calendar before locking it away and Stiles is _kicking_ himself for that one). “Anyway, back to the real question: so, welcome to the Beacon Hills office, and what are you doing here again?”

“Stiles, come on,” Tara mutters, because they have become decent enough friends for her to use that exasperated tone on him.

“Just, you know, since I’m stepping in to help handle stuff while Dad’s on sick leave, and Melissa’s not off shift at the hospital yet,” Stiles says, very politely, because he will totally step up and take any interagency fallout over this, and in return his friend Tara can just roll back that irritation.

Tara frowns a little bit, but she doesn’t contradict him. And across the counter from her, Braeden’s face still hasn’t so much as twitched a brow. Braeden just picks up a folder from the counter and passes it over to Stiles. “There’s a confirmed case of giardiasis downstream of here in Three Forks and two more reported cases over in Ste. Marie. They were all on a biking tour of the local parks, so we’re getting water samples,” she says. “I figured since I’ve been here before, I’d be good for taking the preserve.”

“She didn’t really get much of a look at the woods last time either. Should get a better appreciation for them this time,” Laura says, emerging from one of the back halls. She’s carrying two water bottles with water still dripping down the sides, so Stiles guesses she’d gone to refill those at the office tap. “Hey, how’s your dad feeling?”

“Grumpy, so he’s okay,” Stiles says, skimming the file.

“This is why you dumped Cora and Isaac on me?” Derek mutters to his sister. His tone is kind of off, irritated mixed with an unexpected amount of surprise, plus something else that Stiles can’t immediately identify. It’s…shocked, and also, closer to the way Derek sounds when he’s pissed at Peter for telling him something he doesn’t want to hear, and…

….Laura looks embarrassed, and her eyes almost flick over to Braeden before taking a very obvious, very not-composed detour away from the other woman. “Derek,” Laura says flatly. “Shut up. Ah…so your dad need something, Stiles? What are you two doing here? I thought you said you were going to be at home all afternoon.”

“I didn’t see a meeting on your dad’s schedule,” Tara chimes in. “And I am in charge of rearranging that.”

“Yeah, I know, he told me,” Stiles says, glaring at her. “But I…need to swing by the tree, actually. To do tree stuff. And…I need some stuff out of storage. So Derek and I are just gonna grab it, and hey, since we’re all here, why don’t we go out with Laura and Braeden and really give Braeden the insiders behind-the-scenes tour of this place? That sounds fun, doesn’t it?”

Laura is continuing to look embarrassed and also strangely unhappy with this idea, considering she usually is all for any time when she can hang out and poke at her brother, while Braeden just thanks Stiles and says that that anything that helps her do her work would be great, since she’d like to get the samples sent in by the end of the day. Tara is _totally_ giving Stiles the evil eye, and when he ducks behind the counter, she mutters that she hopes he and Melissa are on the same page because she is not delaying her Alaska vacation next week over this.

“Of course not, you gotta go caribou when it’s sunny all night,” Stiles mutters back, and then he scoots his butt to the storage room.

He has to, because he said he needed to, but he doesn’t want to be gone too long just in case Tara decides to call his bluff. Normally he could trust Derek to run interference on this, but with the way Derek and Laura had been looking at each other—he just doesn’t know what’s going on there so he’s just going to grab something off the nearest shelf and come right back.

“That’s a pretty big bore,” Braeden says. When Stiles looks blank, she nods to the…he’s holding a tranquilizer dart for bears.

“I don’t think your father’s cleared to shoot anything right now,” Tara frowns. “Besides, what on earth is getting into your backyard that’s that big?”

“No kidding, Derek. Maybe you should go check the perimeter,” Laura says, with enough meaning in her tone to snap a full-grown sycamore. “You know, over there.”

Stiles grabs Derek around the shoulders before he can answer and steers them both towards the parking lot. “Of course Dad isn’t shooting anything, Dad is chilling out in the bedroom where absolutely no shooting needs to be done. He just…he’s having a hard time letting go, so finally I just said I’d get him this so he can take it apart and figure out why the gun jammed on him last month, okay? So that’s not totally what the doctor ordered but for the sake of Dad’s and my sanity, I needed _something_.”

He’s whiny and defensive, and grimacing even before he’s done, but for some reason Tara softens. “Yeah, I can see that,” she says sympathetically. “Your dad, honestly. I listened in on Melissa and him for ten minutes…well, look, let’s just get out to the tree and then you can go give him his dart. You don’t think it’ll take long to introduce Braeden to it, do you?”

“Oh, um, nah, probably not. Should be fine,” Stiles says without thinking. And then his brain catches up with his improvising, and he realizes Tara actually just did him a huge solid there, since on the one hand, he can’t be out too long and still have a believable story. Not to mention there’s a pack waiting for him to get back so they can finish bickering over patrol schedules.

On the other hand, Braeden’s a stranger who’s going to be wandering around in his woods and taking samples for official government-type purposes. True, she probably just needs to stick a cup into a couple streams, and for that level of sampling, Stiles doesn’t _have_ to be there in person to make sure the Nemeton doesn’t take that the wrong way. The rangers can just call him and have him remotely commune with the tree—which is what he bets Tara had been planning—but in person is just politer. And Braeden is a stranger but she’s shown up twice now, and when she’s under consideration for a post at Beacon Hills.

Stiles totally calls politicking. In his head, anyway. “So I guess you must have liked what you saw last time?” is what he says out loud, as they head onto the trail behind the building. “I mean, what did you see, anyway? I know you saw Melissa’s backyard, but—”

For some reason Laura is giving Stiles pissy eyes over Braeden’s shoulder. Derek pulls himself up next to Stiles and glares right back at her and Braeden and Tara politely pretend none of that is happening. “I drove out here to meet with your father,” Braeden says, occasionally glancing around at the scenery. “Got a few minutes to talk before we realized that Rob—the FBI point—he’d wandered off. So I saw the entrance drive, and the inside of the office there. Didn’t really see much else.”

“I was telling Braeden that we host open hunt for the area weres, and non-weres can come walk in our part of the preserve for that,” Laura says, trying to simultaneously stare Derek down and smile at Braeden. “It’s really nice this time of year, with the wildflowers and the baby animals.”

“Yeah, it’s cool,” Stiles agrees. “Flowers and babies.”

“I’ve heard that from a couple people, though to be completely honest with you, neither of those are really what I’m into,” Braeden says.

Laura winces. Derek smirks. Stiles pulls at Derek’s arm to make him walk further away from his sister. “I did hear from my dad that you’re formerly of the Marshals and now you’re with the CDC?” Stiles says. “That’s an interesting switch.”

“I was just talking about that with Tara here, actually,” Braeden says. She is so level that Stiles almost wants to reach out and tip her, and see whether she just rocks right back to where she was. “The U.S. Marshals were a great training ground and gave me a base, but I was burning out there. I’ve got a friend in the CDC who was telling me they’re really expanding their environmental pathogens work—we met when we partnered up for a science fair project about the common cold in sixth grade. I liked epidemiology a lot, but when it came to college, I couldn’t afford to get into one with a decent program and didn’t have the grades for a scholarship.”

“So she’s in the CDC field researcher training program now,” Tara says. “She’s on that study of theirs for geomantic effects on parasite cycles—”

“Oh, seriously?” Stiles says, looking at Braeden with new respect. “Dad and I have been trying for ages to pry money out of the Service to do more work on that angle of pest control. I am so jealous of the CDC study, you have no idea—”

 _Bad earth_ , the Nemeton warns, flashing Stiles an impression of crumbling dirt. Stiles immediately stops, and since he’s holding onto Derek, Derek stops too. Braeden was looking at Stiles since they were talking, so she stops, though her brows scrunch a little.

Laura and Tara, however, keep walking. A second later Stiles remembers he’s supposed to verbalize stuff the tree tells him because that is his actual _job_. He yelps and lunges forward, but by then Tara’s already thrown her arms up in surprise. So he misses grabbing her and she goes sliding with the dirt of the trail. Laura jumps clear, then reverses and leaps after Tara, but she has to twist around Braeden and that slows her down.

Derek dives after Tara, grabbing a bush to make sure he stays on his feet, and manages to get her by the wrist just as a small hole opens up where the trail had been. It’s about a foot deep and three long and shaped like a crooked vee, and as Stiles scrambles after them, the tree assures him that the ground around it is solid.

“I’m okay, I’m okay,” Tara says, waving Stiles off. “I’m—” she tries to stand up and her face crumples, and she ends up sagging back into Derek “—shit. Okay. I’m…my ankle rolled, damn it.”

“I’m really sorry, the tree’s saying there was a ground squirrel burrow and the rain last week shifted the dirt,” Stiles says. “How bad is your ankle? Never mind, stupid question, you’re not walking back.”

“Nope,” Tara grunts.

“Here, I can carry you back,” Laura says. She hops over the new ditch and reaches out for Tara.

“I think we should wrap her ankle first,” Derek says, just as Tara lifts her hand towards Laura.

Tara pauses and looks at him, then down at her ankle. She twists her foot and then hisses, sinking her hand into Derek’s shoulder. “I—”

“The office is two minutes if I run, and she can just go on my back,” Laura points out. “It won’t be that long.”

“But if it’s broken, you’re supposed to not jar the bones around,” Derek says. “Do you actually pay any attention to the non-were first-aid course you help Mom teach?”

“For God’s sake, it’s my damn ankle,” Tara snaps at both of them. “And I think I’m going to get my belt off and strap it, and then—”

Braeden clears her throat. When they look at her, she lowers her phone and then points back towards the station. “Called the front desk, they said they’d send out somebody with the ATV. You okay with that?”

“It’s a five-minute drive, I think I can deal,” Tara mutters under her breath. “Somebody’s got to stay here and get this trail closed off anyway.”

“Oh, yeah, right,” Stiles says, fumbling out his own phone. “I’ll call them and have the—”

Tara breathes in very slowly and loudly, like a bull, or maybe a Service ranger who is this close to not caring that Stiles is the resident Nemeton guardian and just dressing him down like any other idiot. “Stiles. When the ATV shows up, I can do that. Now can you just help Braeden out so we don’t hold up the CDC?”

“Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense too,” Stiles says. “Right. Um…um…but I think somebody should stay with you, too.”

“For the whole _five_ minutes it’ll be,” Tara says.

“Yeah—yeah, well, you don’t know what can happen in five minutes, and anyway, it’s protocol to not leave the wounded,” Stiles says, scrabbling like crazy for a verbal handhold and then suddenly finding a nice, sturdy spur in how much Tara suddenly sounds like his dad and how they are both trying to blow off injuries. “I don’t see a life-threatening situation to the rest of us, and I am not scared of the _CDC_ , of all agencies. Um. I mean, no offense, Braeden.”

Braeden shrugs and in that one gesture, manages to convey that she wasn’t offended, but for the record, they’re cool anyway. She’s really very deadpan about everything and Stiles knows he should be thankful for it, but it is perversely getting on his nerves.

“I’ll stay,” Laura says. “You guys go ahead. I can catch up once they’ve picked Tara up.”

“You sure?” Derek says to Laura, who makes a face at him. Derek frowns and then he rolls his eyes. “Look, I wasn’t actually trying to make it about that, but—whatever, have it your way.”

Derek stomps off a couple feet, then stops when he realizes that he’s got nobody with him. He turns around and looks at Stiles, who tries to pull himself together already, because he is doing pretty ridiculously bad here and like he just said to Tara, there’s not even a life-threatening menace around. 

So Stiles offers Braeden the next go and Braeden walks forward. Stiles takes a deep breath, detours around the ditch and comes up after her, and then they’re back on track, literally and metaphorically. And hopefully.

* * *

The rest of the way over, Stiles is communing a little more deeply with the Nemeton than he usually would, just to make sure that they don’t repeat the deal with the trail again. It’s hard for him to keep up a conversation with other people when he’s doing that—well, okay, it’s not hard for him to talk to other people, but unless they’ve been around him for a while, it’s hard for them to follow what he’s saying. So he mostly leaves the social chitchat to Derek.

Derek, predictably, snarls twice to scare off some curious coyotes, points out one local landmark, and fills out the rest of the time with noncommittal grunts. He doesn’t have to do that too much: Braeden asks maybe three questions, Stiles thinks. One about whether a camp-site they go by is one Tara said something about, one about Stiles walking into a tree (Derek is already pushing him out of the way), and one about waffles. Though Stiles isn’t totally sure he didn’t make that last one up, seeing as he was in the middle of explaining to the tree why giardiasis sucks (it’s kind of hard to get across the concept of uncontrollable diarrhea to a plant).

Anyway, they arrive at the tree and Braeden drops her deadpan to be in awe of the tree, as she should be. She compliments Stiles on the Nemeton’s growth cracks and he thanks her. And he might be a little distracted that she actually knows enough to know what a growth crack is when the tree mentions to him that there’s a mother and baby bear in the area.

“Right, you should be good to go,” Stiles says to Braeden. He gives the tree a last pat and then hops off its root. “Just remember, it’ll flag you if you try to add a sample spot you didn’t mention, and if you take samples of something besides the water. I’m not saying you can’t do that, but if you think you need to, you should call us first so we can clear it.”

“Got it. And thank you again,” Braeden says. She pulls her phone out and checks the time, then slings her backpack around to her front to open up the top. Then she starts pulling out a rack of plastic test tubes. “So Laura—”

“She’s coming up,” Derek says. He’s standing off to the side, his head tilted as he listens. “She’s saying sorry about that, she just ran into a couple of lost hikers, and she’s walking them over to the fork to the lake and then she’ll be right up. Should just be a couple more minutes.”

Braeden says that’s no problem and keeps rummaging around in her backpack. The fork to the lake, Stiles thinks absently. Second to last turn before you head up to the tree. That should be…Stiles jerks. “Bear!”

Derek’s head whips around. “What?”

“Oh, crap, the—” Stiles dives backwards and slaps his hand against the Nemeton’s trunk again, telling it to have the trees near the bears start moving around and scare them off. “There’s a mother and cub right by that fork, they can’t, wait, I’m, oh, goddamn it, why do you not go the way I need you to and bear, bear, _bear_.”

Derek lunges forward, then drags himself back just as quickly. Stiles would ask him why he’s stalling if Stiles wasn’t so busy dipping in and out of Nemeton worldview, trying to figure out why every time he rattles the bushes, the bears go _towards_ the hikers—and then Derek puts his head back and howls. Oh, right. Makes sense to just yell, Laura’s already over there.

So Stiles leaves Derek to that and gets all the way into the Nemeton, chasing around pounding bear paws and root-snagging claws with branches, and finally he gets the bears going in the direction that he wants them to go.

He pulls out of the Nemeton and then tries to catch the breath he hasn’t realized he’d gotten short on. He has to lean his shoulder against the tree, he’s panting so hard, and a second later he feels Derek’s hands on his arms, helping to steady him. His head still feels a little tight, but it loosens up as he rubs at his temples.

“…freaked out, she thinks we better walk them back,” Derek is saying.

“Huh?” Stiles says.

“The hikers,” Derek says. He sounds unhappy. He starts to say more, but is cut off by another werewolf howl. “Laura says the mother bear got within a couple yards of them and they’re really upset. The man’s crying and she doesn’t think she can leave them.”

“Oh. _Oh_.” Stiles presses his hand to the side of his head, trying to put it all together, and gets…he is really, really not doing too great today. “Oh, yeah, I…I…she should stay. But somebody’s gotta walk Braeden around.”

“Yeah, I was thinking I’d do that,” Derek mutters. When Stiles looks up at him, Derek sighs and glances away, then looks back at him. “You maybe should go back too. You looked really intense there.”

“I’m okay, I’m just—that stupid bear would _not_ go the right way, why do animals have to be so—so uncooperative,” Stiles says. “Vines would do what I want them to.”

Derek isn’t exactly known for his tact, but sometimes his grunting habit saves him. At least, Stiles is going to choose to not try and figure out what emotions Derek was trying to express with that noise, and just…just try and salvage some professionalism from this whole snowballing deal.

“Okay, well, thanks,” Stiles says. He leans up and gives Derek a quick kiss, then ends up smiling as Derek sneaks in an even quicker cheek-scenting. “I’ll head over to Laura and the hikers, and you just don’t tease her too much before we get back to the office. Last thing I need is an irritated alpha.”

“She’s not irritated, she’s just being ridiculous,” Derek says with an eye-roll. “Whatever. Just remind her that you’re my alpha if she gets weird.”

Stiles doesn’t totally follow that line of thought, he’ll admit, but he’s kind of busy trying to think of a way to explain the new plan to Braeden without making it look like he doesn’t know what he’s doing with his tree. Even if that’s kind of what just happened. “I’m gonna call Scott and see if he can come pick me up from the office,” he tells Derek. “I know, I know, you are regretting being a good, decent, self-sacrificing beta already, but even if we get there and Laura can go back out right away and swap with you, it’ll still take a while for her to find you. I can’t just sit at the office. Everybody’s probably already thinking we just sneaked off to have sex.”

“Yeah, well, they should have to deal with Laura,” Derek says. He leans in like he might try to go for one more scenting, then presses his lips together and grudgingly leans back. “Let me know when you’re back.”

“Will text,” Stiles nods, before turning to a very, very patient Braeden.

* * *

Derek takes Braeden off to her first stream, and Stiles goes to help Laura with the hikers. By the time he gets there, they’ve at least calmed down, but the man is adamant that he is not spending a second longer in the preserve than he has to. So Stiles and Laura walk them towards a nearby campsite where a ranger can drive out and pick them up, and take them the rest of the way to the preserve entrance.

Stiles doesn’t actually get that far. He gets dropped off at the office, where he plans to check on Tara and then call Scott, but he doesn’t even get all the way in the door before Melissa is calling his name.

“Hi,” Stiles says, after freezing up, mentally running through every possible alibi he can in that nanosecond, and then resigning himself to just withering under Melissa’s no-bullshit stare. “I thought your shift wasn’t over for another—”

“Alpha,” Peter says, popping up out of nowhere.

Stiles jumps, which accidentally takes him back outside. So Peter follows him and gives him a good greeting scenting, which is completely within werewolf protocol and which also gives Stiles a good three seconds to lean into Peter’s chest and remind himself that surviving today gets him the good stuff.

Then Melissa follows him out. “Yes, my shift wasn’t, but I pulled the Service card and got out early because I _thought_ I’d need to head off your father.”

“Oh, hey, you know, I have not checked on him in…wow, really, an hour and a half?” For a second Stiles is genuinely shocked at the numbers on his phone. Then he shakes his head and unlocks it. “I should—”

“He’s still at home, and not near his phone, thankfully.” Melissa has her arms crossed over her chest. She still has her scrubs on, but she’s stuffed the bottoms of her pants into hiking boots and she’s thrown a Service coat over the top. She looks like she means business and like business means immediate compliance or death. “ _You_ , on the other hand, have ten minutes to think of a way to blow off the NSA.”

“I—ten—wait, I didn’t do _that_ ,” Stiles yelps. “I haven’t done anything to them all month! I haven’t even sent their feedback hotline any anonymous complaints. I—what are you saying I did, again?”

“No, you didn’t do ‘that,’ but we don’t have time to figure out what was the ‘this’ I know you did,” Melissa says with an annoyed shake of her head. That’s about when Stiles realizes that Melissa has no idea what they’ve just been doing. “Come on, I’m not going to talk about this outside.”

She shoos Stiles and Peter, who’s gotten over his scenting high to look genuinely serious, inside and into the nearest conference room. Then she hands Stiles a file so new that when he opens it, Peter snorts at the metallic whiff of fresh ink, and Stiles actually has to put the file down on the table because the sheets are so warm from the printer.

“Those inconsiderate assholes tried to call your father first, but they kept going to voicemail, so then they called me,” Melissa says. “I thought you might be running around so I asked Peter to help track you down, since my _son_ also seems to be dodging the phone.”

“I took all Dad’s phones away. Didn’t take Scott’s phone, but he’s at my place and probably busy trying to keep Cora from strangling Jackson,” Stiles says distractedly, skimming the papers in front of him. “Okay, really? They really had to nail this guy right now? And not only that, but there’s absolutely nothing they can do with him between here and Spokane?”

Melissa goes from giving Stiles the ninth degree to throwing her hands up in the air with just as much outrage. “As if all we have to do is be their clean-up team.”

“What’s going on?” When Melissa and Stiles look at him, Peter sighs and gestures at the papers. “All I was told was there was an urgent Service matter and we needed Stiles. Now, I can probably infer a few things from the conversation just now, but should I really be going on inference?”

“I think that’s pretty close to your preferred habitat, even if it’s not your natural one,” Stiles snorts, though he’s spinning the papers so that Peter can take a look. “The basics are that the NSA are going to be delivering one of their messes to be tree food, and package is showing up in three hours, which is a _ridiculous_ window for figuring out how to coordinate and clear out the preserve around the tree. So ridiculous, in fact, that it violates our interagency agreement in about fifty zillion ways. We’re supposed to have at least forty-eight hours of notice, and that’s supposed to be pre-death notice, and we’re supposed to get a—”

Melissa rubs at the side of her face. “Stiles, much as I’d like to hear you go through all the ways that they’re screwing up, we both know that will take a good four hours and the best I could do was tell them to wait till I got the office and then call back.”

“Well, is there a reason why you can’t just refuse?” Peter asks.

“There are a lot. Keeping up good interagency relations and stuff like that. But I don’t really think that means we have to just take what we get every time, and I think this is one of the times that we shouldn’t,” Stiles says. Then he turns to Melissa. “Right?”

She nods, but it’s a little slow, and she’s got her arms around her chest again. “Yes, I think that’s right. This is just totally unreasonable of them. But Stiles, it is a division-level sign-off on their side, so I can scream my head off and they’ll override me even with the temporary authority. I don’t want to get your dad—”

“Well, you don’t have to,” Stiles says. “They have to get the Secretary of Defense to override me if I don’t think it’s in the tree’s best interest, and I am _not_ in the mood. And really, are they really gonna call up the Secretary on this? I don’t think so.”

“Stiles,” Melissa starts. She’s frowning, and looking like now that she’s had a little time to sit with it, she’s rethinking her approach. “Stiles, listen, I agree that they won’t go that far, but I’ve been on a few calls when your dad threw out one of these, and before you go to town on them, I think—”

The call module in the center of the conference table beeps loudly. Melissa jumps, bangs her arm against the table, and is cradling against her with a sour look on her face when the door opens. “Fertilizer rep on the line,” says a rattled-looking ranger, who immediately pops back out.

“Let’s just get this over with,” Stiles says.

He reaches over and hits ‘answer’; Melissa had put out her hand to stop him, but she only gets halfway there and the NSA moron on the other end of the line immediately starts to introduce himself. So Melissa sinks back in her seat and Stiles sits up, and tells the NSA nothing doing.

Somehow, they end up talking about it for another twenty minutes.

The thing is, Stiles keeps saying that they can’t do it and pointing out all of the protocols and precautions that the NSA is violating. Then the NSA guy keeps saying that they can’t just abandon a classified corpse by the side of the highway, and that Stiles could just do X and things would be okay. So then Stiles points out that X doesn’t solve Y, and also, creates problems A to G. And then they start all over again.

At some point Stiles ends up facedown on the table, his palms pressed to his aching head, while he tries to keep straight which problem he’s pushing back on with the NSA asshole and _also_ using the other half of his brain to tell the tree that yes, he is in pain, but no, unfortunately, the tree can’t help with this and please, please, _please_ don’t take seriously those mental images of tree roots engulfing the NSA headquarters. Because this is hell but Stiles will not be that guy. He will not. He is one of the good guys. He is a sane, conscientious tree guardian who does not abuse his tree’s awesomeness.

“You’re willfully refusing to understand,” Peter finally breaks in. He’s stayed out of the talking, letting Stiles and Melissa argue their side, but he’s been looking increasingly upset, with glow sneaking into his eyes and his claws creeping out. “Stiles has told you over and over that this is too far outside of—”

 _“Who the hell are you again? McCall, are there uncleared personnel on this line?”_ comes the reply.

Peter visibly holds back a shift. “I have proper security clearance,” he says, carefully enunciating each snarl-free word. “I refer you to the code we all gave you _after_ Mrs. McCall reminded you we needed to provide that before you could start discussing logistics.”

“Look, we’re just not doing it, and I don’t care what kind of stupid excuses you come up with,” Stiles snaps. “I just don’t want to, okay?”

 _“Well, welcome to the government, kiddo. Sometimes you have to put on your big boy pants and do things you don’t want to, because that’s called doing your job,”_ the asshole says. _“Or do you want me to call up your Director and let the Service know that they’ve got somebody who thinks they can just check out whenever they feel like it?”_

Stiles. He literally. He can’t. He just stares at the phone. Honestly, for a second, he’s not sure his neurons are even working. It’s like everything in his head just freezes at the sheer _unreality_ of what he’s hearing.

 _“Oh, hi!”_ suddenly comes a second, female voice, warm and friendly. _“Clearance ten one nine nine seven revelations thirteen one, and are you really so thick in the head that you’re going to dismiss a tree guardian who is trying to advise as to the best protection for the oldest Nemeton in California? Don’t answer that yet, I know you haven’t checked my clearance code. You should.”_

The NSA guy lets out this huffing, kind of choky-laughing noise, and then he goes silent. And silent. Stiles glances at Melissa, who holds out her phone so he can see the text exchange between her and Marcella, Stiles’ dad’s boss.

 _“Director,”_ the NSA guy says, with a strangled clearing-the-throat cough. _“Didn’t realize you’d be joining us. We were—”_

 _“You’re trying to browbeat my people into saving your ass and betting on it not getting up to me. Well, it has,”_ Marcella says, dropping all the friendliness. _“Get off this line. I have your division and directorate heads on the other line, and we need to discuss how you are never, ever getting access to the Nemeton again.”_

The line fuzzes, then clicks, and the blinking light on the call module flips from green to red. After a few seconds, Melissa reaches over and ends the call.

“I’m sorry, Stiles, but it just wasn’t getting anywhere and we needed to cut that off before they drove all the way here and dumped the body on us,” Melissa says. She pauses, and then puts her hand on his shoulder. “Sometimes you just have to kick it up the chain.”

“He certainly wasn’t taking a cue from our kicking,” Peter says. “If I didn’t still want to break his neck, I would applaud him for his tenacity.”

Stiles nods to both of those comments, because it’s not like he can disagree, or wants to. And at least they’re off the hook with the NSA now, though since Marcella got involved, Stiles’ dad is going to end up hearing about this.

“You’re not going to be in trouble for calling her in,” Melissa adds, looking a little concerned. “If that’s what you’re thinking, don’t worry about it. First of all, I called her, and second, moments like this are why we have supervisors. Trust me, your dad’s not going to get upset at you for the NSA.”

“No, no, I’m okay,” Stiles says. He takes a deep breath and puts his hands flat against the table, and then stands up. Then he bites back an irritated noise as both Melissa and Peter reach for him. “I’m fine, really. I just—I should really get back to the house. Oh—oh, what time is it? I told them it’d just be a couple minutes!”

“Who?” Melissa frowns, switching from worried to suspicious.

So then Stiles has to explain to her that he’d just been having a little pack meeting, no big deal, it’s just part of his alpha deal, and they weren’t plotting anything, they were just hanging out. As you do when you have pack and friends. Which Melissa eventually seems to believe, though she tells Stiles to have Scott reply to her texts.

That gets Stiles out of the conference room, but then Peter’s sliding his hand up Stiles’ back and suggesting in a low voice that they step into Stiles’ dad’s office for a second, and it is _not_ his let’s-have-sex-in-inappropriate-places voice. It is, instead, his I-smell-plot-and-you-did-not-invite-me voice, and while Peter is generally supportive of Stiles’ planning style, his quid pro quo is that Stiles immediately bring him up to date with the kind of detailed briefing Stiles normally reserves for budget defenses.

Tara hobbles by on crutches, blocking the hall, and Stiles at least manages to check that she’s all right. It’s also an excuse to get out to the parking lot, since she needs a hand with her bag, and when they get out there, Stiles suggests to Peter that they drive home so Stiles can just bring him up to speed in the car.

Stiles actually is prepared to start unloading—they won’t be on the road nearly long enough for the full story, so it’ll naturally cap things at a skeleton outline—but Peter’s barely pulled onto the main road into town when Talia calls him. Turns out that she wants her own update, about how Laura is doing with Braeden, and Stiles barely has time to explain to her how the Laura-and-Derek switch came about before they arrive in front of his house.

Except for Allison’s car, the driveway is empty. Stiles gets an uncomfortable feeling in his gut and some of it must show on his face, because Peter suddenly tells Talia that he’ll call her back. “Stiles?” Peter says, leaning over. “Stiles, are you—”

The front door opens and Scott comes out, followed by Allison. They walk down the drive and Stiles slides out of the car to meet them, and Scott breaks out with that one smile of his, where he’s trying to compensate for the awkwardness of being the loner misfit with the sheer power of his friendship.

Scott’s pretty good at that one, Stiles will admit. Even now, Stiles still gets a warm little glow in his chest. But they’re high school graduates, and Stiles can see the writing when it’s…not there because nobody’s around to put it up on the wall. “Everybody went home?”

“Well, we tried to call and text you to see what was up, and then Alpha Hale told Cora she needed to come home and help with something,” Scott says, still smiling like he’s trying to cure the world of loneliness. He even comes up and hugs Stiles like Stiles went out of town for a few days (which honestly just ends up digging deeper at the time-management fail part of things, but Stiles isn’t going to tell his friend that).

“Isaac wasn’t sure if he needed to go too or not, so he thought it’d be safer to go and see, and Lydia and Jackson had to leave to help Jackson’s dad with prep for that event of his,” Allison adds. “Melissa called too, but we didn’t hear because of Jackson—her voicemail said you had some last-minute meeting at the office?”

“Yeah. Yeah, don’t worry about that, we took care of it and don’t have to do anything,” Stiles says.

Scott nods, but he’s looking past Stiles. “Where’d Derek go? Is something the matter?”

He’s asking Peter that. “No, no, just a visiting CDC representative Talia’s trying to network with. Nothing that a little more discretion among her children can’t fix, though that appears to be congenitally unlikely at this point. But that is certainly not your problem, Scott.”

“Anyway, we weren’t sure what we should do, so we figured we could just wait till you got back or Melissa called again,” Allison says. “Besides, somebody had to stay with your dad.”

“Yeah, I know, and thank you so much for that,” Stiles says, while his insides squeeze up just that much more in dismay. “Um, so. Is he…did he…”

“Oh, I think he’s okay. He hasn’t really asked for anything,” Scott assures him. “Well, he did want something to eat, but I gave him the granola bars. I didn’t give him any of Mom’s pie, I promise.”

Stiles blinks. “There was pie left?”

“Yeah, a couple slices,” Scott says. “I had to arm-wrestle Cora, but I made sure she didn’t eat all of it.”

“Cora ate Melissa’s pie?” Peter says sharply. Then he drops his face into his hand, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Sometimes I honestly wonder whether we _need_ a next generation. What’s the point of carrying on the family name if the family name is going to be synonymous with stupendously bad judgment about who to pick fights with…”

Peter wanders off a few feet, muttering to himself, and then pulls his phone out—right, he had to call Talia back anyway. Scott and Allison give him confused-to-curious looks, and then Allison turns back to Stiles. “Your dad went back up after he ate, and I think he might still be napping,” Allison says. “So, I know we were talking extra patrols—”

“ _Yes_. Yes, we were. Patrols. Yes.” And it just about sums up the whole day that Stiles has so lost the plot he can’t even remember what he was having his pack doing when it all started. “Did we at least get those straightened out?”

“Some of it, we did,” Scott says, trying to look optimistic. “I think we’re okay at least from tonight to tomorrow afternoon, right?”

“I thought Lydia was still trying to put Cora and Jackson on the west side together,” Allison says, frowning at him. “And Isaac said he needed to check with Laura about tomorrow.”

“Oh, right.” Even Scott can’t keep a happy face on at this point. His shoulders slump and he runs one hand back through his hair, looking like it was somehow on him to keep somebody else’s pack on point. “Sorry, Stiles. If it helps, Lydia said she’d email around the spreadsheet, and then she’d try and get online later if you wanted to work on it some more.”

“Not your fault, buddy,” Stiles says, smiling and patting Scott on the back, and just generally trying to at least do one thing right today. “I’ll talk to her. In the meantime, doesn’t really look like there’s much here to do, sorry—oh, and your mom wants you to call her back, so I won’t keep you.

He sends Scott and Allison on their way, and then checks on Peter—still on the phone with Talia, waving for Stiles to go on in—before heading straight for the kitchen. On top of everything else, he’s just realized, he is starving and the Nemeton is threatening to withhold acorns throughout the preserve if he doesn’t sit down and get some food in him.

Stiles gets himself a bowl of leftover minestrone soup from the Hale kitchen and then starts catching up on his emails and texts. He winces as the first ones from his pack show up, asking him where he is and why he’s taking so long. Then there are Melissa’s missed calls, and Stiles just gives up.

Well, he texts Lydia that the patrol schedule can wait till the morning—they’ll have to adjust everything anyway, since Tara probably will take the day off and the rangers will reschuffle their patrols—and then he puts his phone down. He doesn’t think he can take one more person telling him exactly how things are going wrong right now.

“If the soup’s not any good, I remember seeing some roasted beet salad in the fridge this morning,” Peter says as he comes in. He walks around the table and gets himself a glass of water from the fridge, then comes back to join Stiles. “Derek says he’ll have to miss dinner, but should be home after that.”

“Okay,” Stiles says. Then he looks up. “The soup’s okay. You don’t need to get the beet salad.”

Peter opens his mouth, pauses to change his mind, and just sips from his water. He’s usually all over Stiles by now, but he’s even leaning back in his chair with one arm folded over his chest. He doesn’t look upset or anything like that, so Stiles doesn’t think he’s forgotten something to do with Peter (though it wouldn’t surprise him, with how he’s been not just dropping balls today, but full-on smashing them), but he does keep looking at Stiles like he’s expecting something.

“I should…I should go see what Dad wants for dinner,” Stiles eventually mutters.

“He went into the bathroom a few minutes ago,” Peter says, tilting his head. “I think it might be for a shower…ah, yes.”

Stiles mumbles around a mouthful of soup.

“I did manage to rearrange my schedule so I’ll be on hand to help you take him to the hospital for his progress check,” Peter says. “I have a call at nine tomorrow that I’ll take here, and then we can leave.”

“Okay,” Stiles says. Then he makes a face at the soup, which actually is not okay and is instead a gloriously melded showcase for summer vegetables, thus proving that real minestrone doesn’t need meat to be rib-sticking hearty. “I mean, thanks.”

“Stiles, I’m admittedly missing some information, but you do know that you aren’t responsible for picking up after Laura’s antics, at least?” Peter says, pulling himself up. “My niece no longer has her masters’ thesis, so even she has to admit that she has no one to blame but herself if the CDC gets the impression that we’re treating the government as a dating service.”

“What?” Stiles says. “Oh. _Oh_. Oh, _that_ was what was going on there with Braeden? Wow, I totally—well, no, of course I missed that. Missed pretty much everything else today, why would I catch that.”

Peter starts to say something, and that something sounds a lot like he’s about to ask Stiles whether Stiles is upset. Then he stops himself again. He looks at Stiles, who tries very, very hard to not look like he might just run out and go curl up with the tree and ask it to keep watch while he remembers how to be competent, and then he gets up.

He goes back to the fridge, poking around a little and moving containers in and out, and then returns with a big slice of peach cobbler. The cobbler is conspicuously handmade, and even fresh out of the fridge chill, it’s fragrant with the smokiness of Talia Hale’s wood-fired oven.

“This is from my sister, and she promises that she didn’t use any sugar. It’s just the peaches’ own juices,” Peter says, handing Stiles a fork.

Stiles almost points out that he has in no way, shape, or form earned Hale cobbler today, but Peter isn’t sitting down. Actually, Peter keeps standing over him and Stiles gets the distinct impression that if he tries to refuse the cobbler, Peter’s going to launch into a speech. So Stiles sighs and digs into the cobbler, since he doesn’t want to put more people through any more trouble than he’s already done.

Peter sits down during his second bite. For a few seconds, Peter watches him eat, and then Peter relaxes enough to reach over and swipe a little of the syrup from Stiles’ plate. He licks it off his finger, smiles as Stiles accidentally stabs the fork tines an inch short of the cobbler, and then gives Stiles a thoughtful look.

“Peach cobbler used to be what Talia would bake right after we’d had a pack meeting, in the first few years after she started leading,” Peter says. “Whether the peaches were sliced into wedges, chunked, or just shredded was a fairly good tell for how well the meeting had gone.”

That is not where Stiles was guessing Peter was going to go, and he can’t help glancing really quickly at his plate. When he sees the wedges, he lets out his breath in relief. Then he snorts, and then loosens up enough for a laugh.

Peter smiles along with him. “I preferred to go up to my room and edit my list of relatives who would need to be watched in the future—”

“You had a burn list?” Stiles says, and then he rolls his eyes at himself. “Of course you did. Did you have a rating system too? Revenge immediately all the way to revenge Mafia-style, where you wait till they’re so sure you’re buds that they ask you to stand up as godfather for their kids?”

“I have never seen the point in doing something amateurishly, if I’m going to do it, and you know that very well, Stiles,” Peter says, like he’s offended. The twinkle in his eye, and the way he licks another dot of syrup off his finger, slow-motion-best-cheekbone-angle, says he totally is not. “Anyway. Where was…right. I thought what I did was at least productive, and I just didn’t understand why my sister wouldn’t do the same. She’d actually refuse to go over the meeting until the cobbler was baked and eaten.”

Stiles considers his plate, which is over halfway to empty. “It is really good cobbler.”

“Well, I’m not saying she didn’t know what she was doing with her baking,” Peter snorts. “But it was a waste of time, I thought. If she was angry, she wasn’t doing us any favors by leaning into it and giving the others more time to regroup.”

Then he hisses and gives Stiles a wounded look, because he’d been going for actual crust flakes that time and Stiles had instinctively fended him off with the fork. Stiles feels…not really that guilty. He doesn’t think he deserves cobbler, but Peter gave it to him and he started eating it, and what Peter said about going all-in if you’re going to do something (and anybody who’s ever had Talia’s pie-crust knows where he’s coming from).

“I did finally ask her.” Peter arches a brow back at Stiles’ skeptical look, then sighs. “All right, we had an argument, and she told me it wasn’t so much that she was angry as that she needed a couple hours to convince herself that she was, in fact, up to being an alpha. If I can make the damn cobbler and it turns out edible, she told me, then I know I can deal with our family.”

“No kidding,” Stiles says, lowering his fork. “You couldn’t ever tell now, she never seems like she’s unsure.”

“Well, many peaches were sacrificed to give her that peace of mind,” Peter says in a soulful tone. Which he undercuts by dodging Stiles’ kick and then crooking his foot so, when Stiles pulls his leg back, he catches Peter’s ankle and takes it with him, pressing their legs together. “That actually wasn’t the end of the argument, and I _do_ see that smirk of yours, alpha. I still think that asking her why she’d leave it up to a pastry to determine whether she was any good was a valid follow-up question. Fine, she wasn’t sure of herself. But if she’d burned the cobbler—”

“That never happened?” Stiles asks.

Peter’s eyes flick back and forth before he answers. He only ever has that tell when he’s…not going to lie, exactly, but for the good of his family, he’s going to be especially diplomatic. “Talia never ate the cobbler—she always said that if she tried, she was sure she’d just notice all the mistakes and none of the good parts. So she’d have me eat it and tell her. I will say that I never had a cobbler I thought merited overthrowing her.”

Stiles laughs, and then scoots his chair over till it’s bumped up against Peter’s. They have to unhook their legs to get them around the table leg, so Stiles twists around and leans into Peter’s shoulder. Lets the man purr against his neck as he puts his non-fork-hand down and gives Peter’s thigh a squeeze.

“Beta of the year award, for sure,” Stiles says.

“Multiple-year reign,” Peter mutters. His lips float over Stiles’ temple, and then he shifts his head so that they can look at each other again. “Anyway, when I asked that, she yelled at me that it’s not the _cobbler_. She knew she could do it, she just needed an excuse to remind herself because sometimes you’re so upset you can’t see yourself, and cobbler was just how she made herself calm down enough to see that.”

He stops there. After a second, Stiles tugs over the plate. He slices off another mouthful and a big piece of crust comes off the filling. Stiles forks up the rest and then pokes the crust towards the rim of the plate. Eats his mouthful, then pointedly keeps the fork in his mouth till Peter takes the crust piece.

“So…you guys were cool?” Stiles says.

Peter shrugs. “Actually, I stormed upstairs and she followed me and found my list, and we had a talk about how realistic it is for me to devote all my time to revenge and sacrifice the rest of my life. I’d admittedly underestimated the amount of time I’d need, and we ended up agreeing that I’d share my plans and she’d make sure I still had time for key teenage milestones like prom, and then she made me a berry tart.”

“Sick of the peaches, huh?” Stiles wipes some peach juice off his mouth and then goes to put his fork down.

The fork makes it down, but it clatters a few times since Stiles’ hand remains a few inches above the table, where Peter is holding it. Peter looks at it and smiles, and then lifts it to his face. He kisses off the syrup, little fluttery kisses with just a hint of warm tongue, and then, when Stiles is starting to shift uncomfortably around, he cranes his head to press his forehead against the side of Stiles’ head, just above the ear.

“I just needed a break from them,” Peter says softly. “So did she, frankly. But that’s the advantage of pack, Stiles.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I know, and I…I really am glad for it,” Stiles says. He reaches up and rubs his hand along Peter’s neck, listening to the man purr.

There’s one more bite of cobbler on the plate. Stiles is pretty full at this point, between the minestrone—he realizes he’s got a third of a bowl left there and winces, and then makes himself push that away. They live in the days of home refrigeration and Saran wrap, and he needs to just…just remember he’s got help for a reason.

Stiles does finish off the cobbler. Then he gets up to put the soup away and investigate the dinner situation; predictably, Peter chases him off from the second one. He makes a pit-stop at the downstairs bathroom and then goes up to the second floor just as his dad’s coming out of the bathroom.

“Hey, son,” his dad says. Still walking a little carefully, but his dad no longer has that constant pinched squint. “I didn’t break into the phones, just so you know.”

“Yeah, I know,” Stiles says. He fidgets a bit, waiting while his dad bundles up the dirty laundry under one arm, then takes a deep breath. “You look a lot better.”

“Well, with all the napping I’ve done today, I’d better,” his dad mutters. “I don’t think I’ve been this well-rested since before you were born. Was that Peter I heard with you?”

“He’s making dinner. Derek got stuck in something, but he’ll be back this evening,” Stiles says. “Um, so…I think you should eat dinner, but after that I should probably catch you up on a few things that happened today. I still want to stick to the doctor’s instructions, _Dad_ , but…yeah. You should know.”

Stiles’ father looks up sharply. His mouth twists as he steadies himself against the wall, but he just needs a moment for that and he doesn’t look dizzy or confused at all about what he’s seeing. He looks pretty focused on Stiles.

A couple seconds pass, and then Stiles’ dad nods with a little more care. “All right,” he says. “So what is dinner, again?”

“Oh, um…well, actually, I was going to ask you that,” Stiles says. “I know for dessert, we have peach cobbler, but the main meal could go a couple different ways.”

Stiles dad looks at him again. “I’m starting to wonder if we should have the update first, if you’re offering me dessert of your own free will.”

“Dad, you can have dessert, it just has to be in line with your caloric intake recommendations,” Stiles says. “And I was gonna go easy on those, considering you’ve been here all day and not in the office where I _know_ they are letting you use the vending machine, but you’re making me seriously rethink my generosity here.”

“All right, fine, have it your way,” his father says. “Cobbler it is.”

“Dad—what? No, that’s not what I said,” Stiles yelps, and he and his father bicker over the menu all the way down the stairs. And it feels a little bit more normal.

* * *

Dinner ends up being leftover roast chicken sandwiches with a red cabbage coleslaw that Peter whips up. Stiles’ dad doesn’t ask about Stiles’ day at all, or about the rangers or the station. He talks to Peter about a Service fundraiser that the Hales have agreed to help cater, which is when they learn that Cora had salvaged the deer Stiles’ dad had hit and the good bits have been turned into sausage that Francis is smoking.

“I think I’d feel a little weird eating that,” Stiles’ dad says, putting down his napkin. “I don’t…it’s not like deer do that on purpose, running and freezing in front of you. This is just me, you know, you can do whatever you want with the sausages, but…it just feels sort of petty for me to eat them.”

“Well, petty or not, I did have a taste and they are turning out very nicely,” Peter says, but he doesn’t push the issue. Then he offers to do the dishes, and helps Stiles get a couple cups of coffee so Stiles and his dad can move out to the back porch.

It’s a nice evening. Quiet, too—Stiles has been periodically checking up on his messages and Derek’s on his way back, while Melissa sent Braeden off with Laura for the night. Stiles makes a note to himself to get Derek’s impressions of Braeden and fill Peter in on that before they turn in for the night. And also sets up a reminder to get another peach cobbler to give to Melissa, and one to figure out something for Marcella too. 

“You’re real quiet over there,” Stiles’ dad says. “You know, I am taking this seriously, and I don’t want to end up making my concussion any worse than it’s already been, and I know I’m not the best patient. But I’m kind of having a hard time not asking, and I’d just…I think I’d have an easier time being less of a cranky old man if you’d say something, Stiles.”

“Yeah. Yeah, no, I wasn’t…I wasn’t trying to hide. Well, okay, honestly, in the beginning I was, but that was just because you really needed to rest and I was going to step up and take care of things and make sure you got it, but that just went way out the window,” Stiles starts, twisting his hands around his cup. “Like, way out. Like I think we might need to call up NASA and borrow one of their telescopes to find it, and…I’m making your head hurt.”

Stiles’ dad sighs, but at the same time he puts his hand on Stiles’ shoulder. “Not any more than the usual, kid. But how about we just start with why everybody was in the living room earlier. I didn’t ask at the time, because I was trying to do what I was supposed to and sleep, but isn’t school out?”

“Hey, I can see my friends without the threat of stupid group chemistry reports over my head,” Stiles says.

He and his dad look at each other. Stiles starts to sink down the porch swing and his dad rolls his eyes and hooks a hand under his elbow to pull him back up. “Come on, Stiles,” his dad says. “Just spit it out already.”

So Stiles does. He starts off with the idea about the extra patrols to make sure nothing springs a surprise on them, and then talks about going to the office and running into Braeden. Then Tara twisting her ankle, and the _bears_ , God, as if Stiles wasn’t literally born to do this. And the hikers and the NSA and Melissa getting in Marcella, and all of it.

Well, okay, he leaves out Peter’s story about Talia and the peach cobbler, since that isn’t about his screw-up. But he puts in everything else, even the stupid story about the dart.

“I do keep meaning to sort out what happened with that tranq gun,” his father says when Stiles is finished. “Forgot about that. When they clear me to come back, I should have Chris take a look at it with me.”

“Makes sense,” Stiles says. “I could—”

“The last time I let you look at a gun, you gave it back to me with five extra settings and I found that out by accidentally making a boar photosensitive,” his dad snorts.

Stiles snorts into his coffee. “Yeah, well, I did give you an updated manual, _Dad_. Which you decided not to read.”

“You gave me a phone book is what you gave me, and don’t give me that face like you don’t know what I mean,” his dad says. “They did still have those when you were born.”

They both roll their eyes, and then his dad shifts around. Stiles looks over, but his dad just digs a twig out from under him, flicks that off, and then takes a sip of coffee. So it’s back to quiet.

“Dad, I just,” Stiles starts. “I just—I just wanted to take care of things so you wouldn’t be worrying about them while you were getting better.”

“Okay,” his father says, glancing over. “I…I probably wouldn’t have rustled up extra patrols, but I think that’s more your call as alpha, so long as you were going to coordinate it with the rang—”

“And I tried, I really did. And I know I’m better than that, too, I know I really should’ve done better, and I just don’t know why I didn’t,” Stiles barges on. It’s just once he starts talking about it, he has to let it all out or end up screaming, is how the pressure on his chest feels. “I made all these rookie errors and every time I tried to get on top of it, something else just popped up and—”

“ _Stiles_ ,” his dad says, giving him a little shake by the shoulder.

The coffee sloshes and Stiles sucks in his breath, looking down. He feels a few drops on his fingers, but that seems to be as far as it got. Still, he sets the coffee off to the side before he looks back at his father, who is watching him with such a concerned look that Stiles feels shitty all over again. His dad’s got a concussion and here he is, making the man think his son has lost his mind.

“Stiles,” his dad says again, more softly. He holds onto Stiles’ shoulder for another second, then lets go of it. But then he twists around so that they’re facing each other. “Stiles. You had a bad day at the office. It happens.”

“Seriously?” Stiles says after a long, disbelieving second.

His father presses his lips together, frustration flitting across his face—which is what makes Stiles believe him, actually—and then lets out a long sigh. “Look, I listened to everything you had to say just now, and do I agree with all of your decisions? No, but it’s not because I blame you or think you made any unforgiveable mistakes, and I want you to look me in the eye and tell me you hear what I’m saying.”

“Dad, we’re literally—yeah. Yeah, I hear you,” Stiles says. “I just…I feel like…”

“I know, son,” his dad says, putting an arm around him. “Believe me, I know. But the thing is, you can’t be on one hundred percent every single day. Some days you’re eighty. But I don’t think you can, or should, hold yourself to account for not being perfect all the time.”

Stiles…doesn’t really want to hear that, but at the same time he does. His mind is doing its best to not let it happen, but his dad’s words sink in anyway, and once they’re in, he can’t help but think them over. “Yeah, but I just…I’m the guardian around here,” he mutters. “There’s a lot I’m supposed to handle. To have just…just down. Like I shouldn’t even have to think about it, it should be just like breathing.”

“Stiles, I know you’ve been a tree guardian your whole life, but you know what? You haven’t actually been alive that long, kid. And nobody died, nobody got that hurt, and from the sound of things, aside from the NSA thing, my inbox isn’t going to be that much fuller. And the NSA one is absolutely not on you,” Stiles’ father says. He gets a little heated towards the end and his arm tightens around Stiles—not too much, but he still winces and loosens up when he notices. “I think I’m actually looking forward to dealing with that one when I get back. If there’s anything left of them.”

Stiles has to smile at that, but it’s still a little limp, he can tell. “Thanks, Dad.”

“I’m not just telling you all this because you’re young and have time to get better, you know,” his dad says after a second. “You’re already good, Stiles. But everybody has days like this—I have days where I come home and sit down and just think I have no idea how somebody didn’t die, but I don’t think it’s because of what I did.”

“But Dad,” Stiles says immediately. “You always—”

“Yeah, yeah, I yell a lot at people, and yelling can cover up a lot of sins if you do it right,” Stiles’ father says. “I kind of thought you’d picked that up.”

“Well, the yelling, sure, but…you…you do get things under control,” Stiles says.

“Eventually. But I’ve screwed up in front of you, and I’ve tried to be honest with you about that,” Stiles’ dad says. The corner of his mouth quirks up for a second. “Not that I won’t take a compliment, but you’ll remember in a second when you’ve seen me do that. Anyway, Stiles, you should at least remember that this is a job. Sure, it’s a job we love and happens to work great with our lives, too, but it’s still a job. And the thing about jobs is sometimes they bury you in the shit.”

Stiles opens his mouth, then closes it. His dad watches him, giving his shoulders another squeeze, and after a few more seconds have passed, the man ruffles his hair and gets up to walk out to the porch rail.

“Trick about jobs, you just get up the next day and go back to work,” his dad says. “ _That’s_ how you tell whether somebody is really any good, you know. If they show up the day after a bad day.”

“Yeah,” Stiles says. He grabs his coffee again, but doesn’t drink it. Just puts it in his lap and looks down into it. Then he frowns and looks up at his dad. “Well, once you have doctor’s clearance. Dad.”

His father starts to deny he was even thinking of that, but Stiles totally catches the little hitch of the man’s shoulders and his dad is lying through his teeth.

“Okay, well, enough work talk for you for tonight,” Stiles says, leaning back and throwing his feet up on a handy box of tools. “Let’s talk about something nice and relaxing and concussion-appropriate. So Melissa says she’s still coming over tomorrow to watch you, and I understand that she thinks nursing rights also mean dessert rights. Dad, no.”

Stiles’ dad groans, and under that Stiles feels the universe just shift that last bit into place.

* * *

The next morning, Stiles wakes up between his betas. Derek’s in front, head stuffed under a pillow, tattoo peeking up over the stretched-out collar of his shirt. Which gets a little more stretched out when Stiles nudges it down with his chin and starts to nip at the edges of the tattoo, right where Derek likes, and Derek grunt-groans and moves into a lazy arch that rubs his ass right back against Stiles’ groin.

Peter’s tucked up behind Stiles, apparently asleep, breathing in long, slow puffs that slither down the back of Stiles’ shirt and end up pooling in a warm tickle at the base of Stiles’ spine. Stiles and Derek’s rocking does make his head move, sliding it from Stiles’ shoulder to about the midpoint of Stiles’ back, and then Peter stirs enough to hike his head up again, his hand dropping off Stiles’ hip as he wriggles back into place. His fingers catch a little bit on Stiles’ pajama pants and then pat around, blindly seeking their way through the folds till somehow they’ve ended up pulling said pajamas down.

Stiles would call Peter out for the shameless manipulation, except it’s first thing in the morning and warm in the bed and Stiles just. Kind of doesn’t feel like it.

So Peter manipulates, and Stiles’ cock approves very much, and soon it is snugly tucked between the globes of Derek’s ass with Peter’s fingers holding it in place, about as close as it can get without one of them going for the lube. And it seems like neither of Stiles’ betas want to bother either, since Derek just uses the curving flex of his belly to urge Stiles’ hand down his pants, and Peter is sidling up firmly to Stiles’ back. Peter’s breathing a little faster now, snippets of purrs mixing into it.

Stiles reaches over his head and behind him with his free hand, and just manages to snag at Peter’s hair. It’s an awkward angle and even early-morning daze can’t make it not awkward, but the way Peter groans, deep and rough into the back of Stiles’ neck, makes up for the strain in Stiles’ elbow.

He digs down another inch, getting a good grip on Peter’s curls, and then drags the man forward as he humps into Derek. Peter groans again, tongue flicking out to taste Stiles’ nape and the sudden wet of it makes Stiles start. It pulls way down deep into Stiles’ body, curling up the muscles in his thighs and groin, and he can feel his cock twitch against Peter’s fingers, between Derek’s buttocks.

Derek seems to feel it too, shoving his ass back so hard that he knocks Peter’s hand away. He rocks himself up sharply against Stiles’ hand, almost pushing his cock free of Stiles’ grip, and then his hips seesaw for a brief but wild moment. His buttocks tighten around Stiles’ cock and Stiles hisses into his shoulder, it feels so good, and just as Derek starts to go limp, Stiles comes.

Peter’s a few seconds late, and less forceful about it than either Stiles and Derek, but judging from the leisurely way he’s nuzzling Stiles’ hairline, it’s not because he’s disappointed in its quality.

“Good _morning_ , man,” Stiles says, just lying there for a second. Sticky, mussed, and awesome.

Then he realizes that Derek still has his head under the pillow. He stares for a second, then snickers and starts to lever himself up. And if he just happens to knock off the pillow while he’s doing that, causing Derek to whine in protest and jerk his head down into a fold of the blanket, well, Derek’s imitation of a small sunlight-phobic rodent is pretty spot-on for a full-grown werewolf.

“Come on,” Stiles says, wiggling his legs out from under Derek. He pokes the lump that is Derek’s sheet-covered head, then swings himself over the other man, absently batting off Peter’s hand. “I have to convince Lydia that all her spreadsheet finagling hasn’t been in vain, and then we gotta get Dad to the hospital for his progress check, and _then_ I need to see what your sister did with Braeden and whether the NSA’s sent an apology and if Melissa’s okay with the office and tons of stuff to do, Derek. Full day, can’t just lie in bed.”

“Don’t see why not,” Derek grumbles, but he finally lifts his head.

Peter’s already gotten off the bed and is picking through his part of the closet. “Well, Derek, I suppose I can always take care of driving them—”

Derek is out of the bed and stalking down the hall with a handful of clothing before Peter even finishes chuckling. Of course, Peter doesn’t cut it short just because of that; he lets his laugh trail off naturally, comparing two shirts, and then he catches Stiles’ eye.

“Hmm?” Stiles says.

“Oh, nothing,” Peter says. “I suppose that you won’t be taking it easy? In light of the NSA?”

“Just because they’re incompetent assholes doesn’t mean I’m gonna,” Stiles starts irritably, and then he sees the way Peter is watching him. He scrubs at his hair, then shrugs. “Yeah, well. I could use them as an excuse to chill out, but that doesn’t really hurt them, does it? And if we’re going to call them out on being lazy free-riders, it’s kind of hypocritical to do the same thing.”

“True,” Peter says. He turns back to the closet and settles on an outfit, which he drapes over his shoulder. “It is your call, alpha. And you can go ahead and kick Derek out of the bathroom—I’ll take my turn after. Someone should tidy up the sheets anyway.”

Stiles smiles, and then detours over to the other man instead of just walking out. Peter blinks at him, looking a little puzzled, but is as enthusiastic as ever when Stiles hooks a hand around his neck and pulls him down for a scenting.

“If we have any time, we need to get more pie or cobbler or something like that,” Stiles tells him. “Just…just in case. Even if it’s a good day, we’ll probably be running around so much that we’ll need something to look forward to.”

“I think Talia might have something pastry-like around,” Peter says quietly. He pauses, then presses his mouth to the side of Stiles’ jaw. “She’d certainly be happy to do what she can, as we all would.”

“Yeah, I know. And—and thanks,” Stiles says. He moves his fingertips against Peter’s neck, then lets the other man go. “I’m gonna check on Dad after I wash up, so see you down in the kitchen?”

“Seems like a reasonable plan,” Peter says. “I suppose I should get breakfast started?”

“Oh, yeah,” Stiles says. “Definitely. Gotta start off the day right—gotta try for that, at least.”

**Author's Note:**

> You should avoid ibuprofen when dealing with concussions because ibuprofen has blood thinning effects and those are not good things when you want to reduce the risk of bleeding in the brain.
> 
> I have not gone beyond season 3A, but I've done some reading on Braeden's backstory and she seems like the type who would appreciate branching out from traditional law enforcement (and epidemiology has a lot in common with forensics and investigative work, actually). In this world, what I'm thinking is she was great at science but ended up getting a criminal justice degree, because she could do that at a cheaper college than the kinds of colleges that offer epidemiology programs and get a job right away, whereas with epidemiology you'd likely have to go on to a doctorate degree. And realistically, not every single character can be from a well-to-do background (TW is somewhat better than similar shows at racial diversity but they seem to handwave away all the potential class diversity with Melissa and John both being single parents in generally low-paying professions). 
> 
> Marcella’s clearance number, as she’s from the movie _Grosse Pointe Blank_ , refers to the film’s ten-year high school anniversary occurring in 1997, and the Revelations quote spoken during the film.
> 
> In the show, the teenagers always end up saving the day with speeches and lone-wolf moves (pun intended), but, especially in a bureaucratic environment, learning how to manage is way more complicated than that. Chains of command are in place for a reason (granted, they have to be functional too, but that's another issue). I wanted to flesh out that part of Stiles' learning curve some more in this piece.


End file.
